Jamster Posted June 5, 2019 Share Posted June 5, 2019 I've just downloaded Photos 1.7 and I've checked the performance settings and Hardware Acceleration isn't available for my GPU, but I think that it should be. I'm running an old cheese grater style Mac Pro, but with High Sierra and an NVIDIA GTX 680, which is an Apple Metal supported card. My graphics card isn't listed under Hardware Acceleration and instead it states 'no compatible GPU'. I've checked my Graphics information on the System Report and it states 'Metal - Supported, feature set macOS GPUFamily1 v3', so I would expect it to be compatible. Does Photo 1.7 have additional hardware requirements for Metal support? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Staff Gabe Posted June 6, 2019 Staff Share Posted June 6, 2019 Hi @Jamster, There's a big difference between Metal Display and Metal compute. Have a look at James' reply: Thanks, Gabe. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
fde101 Posted June 6, 2019 Share Posted June 6, 2019 @GabrielM , that reply is old, and this was supposedly changed with the 1.7 release. I think I may have seen somewhere that it requires Mojave but I could be mistaken. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Staff Gabe Posted June 6, 2019 Staff Share Posted June 6, 2019 Thanks. I've just doubled check and with 1.7, we support whatever graphics card you have installed( Dedicated, integrated, or e-GPU) - as long it supports Metal Compute. I could not find an official list from Apple stating which cards are supported or not, but I presume your card is not compatible if it's not showing up in Designer. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jamster Posted June 6, 2019 Author Share Posted June 6, 2019 @GabrielM. The first screenshot is taken from the System Report on my Mac (go to the Apple logo > About this Mac > System Report...). The entry for Metal states 'supported' and then gives further details, which means that my Graphics Card supports Metal and that my Operating System recognises this. That's to be expected as Apple have stated that the NVIDIA GTX 680 supports Metal (their support document is HT208898). I'm running High Sierra (10.13.6). So the question is really why Affinity Photo isn't recognising this as a Metal supported card? Affinity 1.7 is supposed to have better support for discrete GPUs compared to 1.6 which only supported integrated GPUs. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Staff Gabe Posted June 7, 2019 Staff Share Posted June 7, 2019 I've logged it with our developers for further investigations. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jamster Posted June 7, 2019 Author Share Posted June 7, 2019 Thank you - that's appreciated. Would be good to have this hardware acceleration as it sounds as if it makes a big difference. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Staff Gabe Posted June 10, 2019 Staff Share Posted June 10, 2019 Our developers came back to me and we do not support Nvidia cards at the moment. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jamster Posted June 10, 2019 Author Share Posted June 10, 2019 Hi GabrielM. Can you confirm whether there are any plans to support Nvidia cards? Technically there shouldn’t be any differences as the Metal API is a standard regardless of manufacturer. I think that the only effort of doing so would be in testing. It seems like a very arbitrary decision to support AMD but not Nvidia - it’s not a distinction that Apple makes. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Staff Gabe Posted June 10, 2019 Staff Share Posted June 10, 2019 1 hour ago, Jamster said: Can you confirm whether there are any plans to support Nvidia cards? I cannot confirm nor deny this. At the moment we do not support nVidia. That's as far as I can confirm it. Sorry Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sinesium Posted August 2, 2019 Share Posted August 2, 2019 No Hardware acceleration for nVidia ? Only for weak AMD devices and fancy overpriced Apple ? That is embarrassing that I have (overpriced) nVidia RTX2080Ti and its power cannot be used by Affinity ? It is so embarrassing like not working drag-drop files to the batch job or stack job and constant problem with badly saved HDR file headers ( HDR files saved by Affinity Photo are not readable with UE4, but those from Ps work fine ). Sorry is not enough. Fix it please. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
thomasp Posted August 6, 2019 Share Posted August 6, 2019 Excuse me but - are 2080Ti's even supported anywhere in macOS? I'm sure you can somehow install it in a cheesegrater but it must be so way out of sync with what Apple offers and supports that you may as well sell it to me for a really good price - and get yourself a Vega something something. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ashf Posted August 7, 2019 Share Posted August 7, 2019 I believe Nvidia cards are not supported on Metal2(Metal Computing). So Apple is the one to fix this. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ashf Posted August 7, 2019 Share Posted August 7, 2019 On 8/6/2019 at 12:49 AM, thomasp said: Excuse me but - are 2080Ti's even supported anywhere in macOS? I'm sure you can somehow install it in a cheesegrater but it must be so way out of sync with what Apple offers and supports that you may as well sell it to me for a really good price - and get yourself a Vega something something. I think sinesium is a Windows user. Only DirectX is supported on Windows version for now and there's no hardware compute acceleration yet. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jamster Posted August 7, 2019 Author Share Posted August 7, 2019 33 minutes ago, ashf said: I believe Nvidia cards are not supported on Metal2(Metal Computing). So Apple is the one to fix this. I’m aware that Apple no longer ship with Nvidia cards, but my Nvidia card officially supports Metal according to Apple, see support article - HT208898. Both the GTX680 and K5000 support Metal officially. There are other Nvidia cards that unofficially support Metal too (ie Kepler based or newer) but never had an official Mac version of the card and don’t have native Apple drivers. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ashf Posted August 7, 2019 Share Posted August 7, 2019 8 minutes ago, Jamster said: I’m aware that Apple no longer ship with Nvidia cards, but my Nvidia card officially supports Metal according to Apple, see support article - HT208898. Both the GTX680 and K5000 support Metal officially. There are other Nvidia cards that unofficially support Metal too (ie Kepler based or newer) but never had an official Mac version of the card and don’t have native Apple drivers. I mean Metal Computing in Metal2, not display renderer. As op said, Metal itself can be enabled as display renderer with some nvidia cards. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jamster Posted August 7, 2019 Author Share Posted August 7, 2019 20 minutes ago, ashf said: I mean Metal Computing in Metal2, not display renderer. As op said, Metal itself can be enabled as display renderer with some nvidia cards. Yeah - that’s why I raised this thread as my Nvidia GTX 680 supports Metal, including Metal 2, but Photo Affinity only enables Metal support for display rendering currently. Affinity have responded on another similar thread and have said that they might enable metal computing on Nvidia Metal cards in the future. I hope they do, as I don’t want to switch to an AMD card. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ashf Posted August 7, 2019 Share Posted August 7, 2019 1 minute ago, Jamster said: Yeah - that’s why I raised this thread as my Nvidia GTX 680 supports Metal, including Metal 2, but Photo Affinity only enables Metal support for display rendering currently. Affinity have responded on another similar thread and have said that they might enable metal computing on Nvidia Metal cards in the future. I hope they do, as I don’t want to switch to an AMD card. Oh, I didn't notice you are the op. sorry. I assume what Serif said may depends on if Apple will fully supports nvidia I think. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
fde101 Posted August 9, 2019 Share Posted August 9, 2019 It looks like Metal support is divided into two basic GPU "families" by Apple right now: "family 1" offers less functionality than "family 2". From what little documentation I have been able to scrounge up, there are NO nVidia cards in "family 2": https://developer.apple.com/documentation/metal/mtlfeatureset/mtlfeatureset_macos_gpufamily2_v1?language=objc I don't know what specifically the Affinity apps need to provide metal compute acceleration, but clearly Apple has not been spending the time to make nVidia cards work with the full feature set of Metal. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jamster Posted August 9, 2019 Author Share Posted August 9, 2019 5 hours ago, fde101 said: It looks like Metal support is divided into two basic GPU "families" by Apple right now: "family 1" offers less functionality than "family 2". From what little documentation I have been able to scrounge up, there are NO nVidia cards in "family 2": https://developer.apple.com/documentation/metal/mtlfeatureset/mtlfeatureset_macos_gpufamily2_v1?language=objc I don't know what specifically the Affinity apps need to provide metal compute acceleration, but clearly Apple has not been spending the time to make nVidia cards work with the full feature set of Metal. That doesn’t surprise me that Nvidia cards aren’t part of “family 2” as Apple stopped dealing with Nvidia around 2012/2013. The AMD cards belonging to “family 2” are much more recent. There are older AMD cards which support metal that aren’t on that list either, such as the SAPPHIRE Radeon HD 7950 Mac Edition. There’s another support post on this topic which is more informing, as Andy from Affinity explained that they weren’t currently able to get Nvidia cards to work reliably, as the hardware and drivers are flakey... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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